Salesforce is facing competition from an unexpected place: Amazon

Salesforce could face competition from a surprising new place:
Amazon.

According to new investment research from Jefferies,
Salesforce partners picked Amazon as the 3rd biggest threat to
Salesforce, trailing only Oracle and Microsoft.

Amazon doesn't sell any customer relationship management products
itself. But it has a
bunch of partners who sell CRM solutions through
its AWS Marketplace. Apparently, some customers are choosing
these apps to piggyback along with AWS services such as data
storage and compute power, rather than buying a CRM system
separately.

The survey should be taken with a grain of salt — it
only asked 85 Salesforce partners that mostly target
medium-sized businesses. Salesforce and Microsoft play in this
space, but most customers of the bigger CRM players like Oracle
and SAP are large enterprises.

Still, it's another sign of how powerful AWS is becoming in the
enterprise.